Our goal was to diversify the Wikimedia Foundation's revenue sources, and provide easy opportunities to donate outside of the annual banner appeals we have heavily relied on in the past. By offering more integrated and engaging donor experiences, we believe we can sustain our mission and broaden our impact while exploring more casual and intuitive experiences for donors. We aimed at increasing the number of donations which come from sources outside banner campaigns by 50% across the mobile and desktop websites, as well as the mobile apps.
For the mobile and desktop websites, we started this work by focusing on improving the existing entry points to donation.
As of early 2024, both the mobile and desktop websites had a donation link, which was only available when interacting with menus that are collapsed by default. The goal of this work was to increase the prominence of these entry points without detracting from the overall reading experience.
Desktop donation entry points
editOn desktop, the donation entry point was available collapsed by default on the main menu of the site. Increasing the prominence of this entry point included moving it outside of the menu and into the top right corner of the page.
Design
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Hypothesis
edit- Moving the link out of the collapsed menu would lead to a significant increase in the visibility of the link (as measured through clickthrough rate) when compared to the same time last year
- Moving the link out of the collapsed menu would lead to a significant increase in the number donations when compared to the same time last year
Results
editClick-through rate
editWe define the Click-through rate (CTR) as the ratio of the number of clicks on the donate link to the number of pageview sessions initiated. We calculated the daily CTR for a specific time period and then averaged the results for comparison.
The new donate link was deployed on September 24, 2024, and the old donate link was removed the same day. To understand the impact of moving the donate link to a new location, we compared the CTR of the new donate link, using data collected from September 28 to October 11, 2024, to the CTR of the old donate link, using data collected from September 1 to 23, 2024.
Comparison of clickthrough rate of old link and new link locations
| wiki | Old donate link | New donate link | Difference | new / old | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All wikis | 0.00054% | 0.00702% | 0.00648% | 13.00 | 13 times more likely to click the new donate link |
| Spanish Wikipedia (eswiki) | 0.00045% | 0.00538% | 0.00493% | 11.93 | 12 times more likely to click the new donate link |
| Japanese Wikipedia (jawiki) | 0.00021% | 0.00424% | 0.00403% | 20.32 | 20 times more likely to click the new donate link |
✅ We were able to confirm hypothesis 1: moving the link out of the collapsed menu led to a significant increase in the visibility of the link (as measured through clickthrough rate) when compared to the same time last year. Specifically we saw that the new link was 13 times more likely to be clicked than the previous link.
Number of donations
editTo estimate the number of donations, we will look at the year over year difference of September 2023 to September 2024, and October 2023 to October 2024.
September
| wiki | September 2023 | September 2024 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| All wikis | 5,072 | 6,615 | 26% |
October
| wiki | October 2023 | October 2024 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| All wikis | 5482 | 10294 | 61% |
✅ We were able to confirm hypothesis 2: moving the link out of the collapsed menu led to a significant increase in the number donations when compared to the same time last year. Specifically, we observed a 26% increase in the number of donations outside banners and emails for the month of September 2024 when compared to Semtember 2023, and a 61% increase in the number of donations outside banners and emails for the month of October 2024 when compared to October 2023.